Big Guy. New Digs.

Some of you frequent visitors (We have those? Thanks mom!) might have noticed the site looks different. Well, we hit a little snag with our web hosting. In the past you might have experienced the site occasionally being slow or not available at all. Unfortunately, Namecheap’s EasyWP (WordPress as a service) just didn’t work out for us. I still completely stand by my claim that Namecheap is awesome as a domain registrar, but I can no longer support their hosting service, at least their EasyWP service.

Out with the Old. In with the New.

After consulting with one of the other Big Guys, we ended up landing on DreamHost as our new web hosting provider. So far everything has been outstanding. Once I got past an initial, minor snag, setup was a breeze. I wasn’t going to move it over until this weekend, but sometime in the middle of the day, my other server just stopped responding again, so I flipped the switch. Once all the DNS stuff finished updating, we were back in business. And, it’s so FAST!

Speaking of DNS

When I pointed my domain at the new, provided DNS servers, Google’s DNS servers were still showing the old IP for bigguyonstuff.com because the record had an hour Time-to-Live (TTL) and still had about 50 minutes left. I did a search for a way to flush Google’s public DNS cache and was surprised to find out that it does exist. If you’re ever in that situation and want to help ensure that your DNS records update quickly, you can use this service. I know Google isn’t the only DNS service in town, but it is a huge player. The proper way would be to shorten your TTL before you make the move, but we were in a crunch here and didn’t have time.

Thanks for Your Support!

The other Big Guys and I thank you for your support during this change, but I think you will find that it was for the better. Even as I am writing this post, I am enjoying how much faster it is than our old site. While we were at it, we even found this new awesome theme. I like it much better than the last. Let us know what you think. Also, do yourself a favor if you are in the web hosting hunt and check out DreamHost!